On my last week’s blog I discussed how our Founding Fathers were an exceptional lot, and touched upon why that was so. This week I will show how ordinary working people of today can exhibit the same treasured personality characteristic that our Founding Fathers exhibited when they founded our country and wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

As I mentioned in my last blog, the principles for living happy, fulfilled, and successful lives are the same, whether or not you’re a politician or a common ordinary man or woman who lived their lives in the 1700s or in the 21st century. It’s easy to assume that because life was less complex and in many ways simpler during the Founding Fathers era, that it was much easier to live up to the ideal standards that the Founding Fathers exhibited when they wrote those marvelous documents, because there were fewer competing temptations then, compared to what exists today.

Unlike our Founding Fathers, who put country before self, today, many politicians and nonpolitical persons alike, put fame, power and money ahead of country.

The reason our fledging country was the central focus of our Founding Father’s thoughts and actions was because for 12 years, from the time the delegates from the various colonies gathered to discuss how the colonies were going to deal with England’s many abuses, to the writing of the Constitution, our fledging nation, America, pretty much dominated everyone’s thinking – all of which I discuss in my treatise What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Today’s Leaders Have Lost Their Way.

When our forefathers wrote the Constitution, our Founding Fathers discussed the importance of private and public virtue as being essential in any democratically based republic.

Our Founding Fathers believed that integrity is our country’s most important virtue, for our Constitution was written, and our country was founded upon principles that our integrity encompasses. The integrity I’m speaking of is following one’s heart, (Expressed in our empathy and compassion for others.), and moral compass, in making personal or political decisions.

According to our Founding Fathers, not only are politicians expected to make decisions based on their private virtue, or personal integrity, but also, their public virtue, which is integrity based on being willing to sacrifice their selfish interests and personal desires for the greater good, even if there’s a chance that by doing that, their political ambitions may be jeopardized. So two kinds of integrities are employed in any political decision, they being both private and public virtue.

An excellent example of how my primary care physician, Dr. Tish, used her private virtue, her integrity, in an empathic and compassionate way, was how she acted while giving me my six month check-up. What she did was to carefully listen to my concerns and directed her questions in such a way that helped clarify my thinking, all of which helped relieve any anxiety I might have had at the moment.

Another example of her empathic ability, knowing that I am a writer who’s deeply concerned about the profound decay of our nation’s private and public virtues, or our integrity over the years, which has made me extremely angry, I asked her if she had any medicine to temper my rage? Rather than immediately say yes, and giving me some medication to help diminish my symptoms, my annoyance, she asked me how preoccupied I was with my writing? I told her that it’s the last thing I think about before I go to bed, and the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. Dr. Tish recognized that having feelings about what I write can be a good thing because it can provide me with a kind of ‘grist for the mill’, in signaling what I should focus on and what may be important to write about. She didn’t want me to necessarily dampen that. So, by her not providing any medication to help temper things, what she was tacitly telling me is that I should monitor my situation to see whether or not I could use those angry feelings in a way helpful in providing me with the direction and clarity to what I may feel is important for me to focus on in my writing.

Regardless what we do in life, society holds each of us to the same standard of excellence in how we use our integrities, regardless whether or not we’re the President of the United States, a Founding Father, today’s politician, or an ordinary citizen.